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Risk and Regulation Working Group (RWG) member Martin Davies shares his views on what he thinks are the issues in risk management that banks seem to be missing. Davies is "a risk architect focused on structured products for emerging markets and works with several tier one banks, regulators and brokerages across South East Asia". The post below first appeared on his blog and the following excerpt has been re-produced with his permission.

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision latest announcements which more than doubles lenders’ capital requirements but gives them as long as eight years to fully comply, has cast a bearish gloom on banks globally. However, as far as Asia-Pacific Banks are concerned, we maintain that lenders outside Japan are reasonably well-positioned to weather the impact of the new rules.

The Basel III rules about new global regulatory standards on bank capital adequacy and liquidity are finally here after several twists and turns. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) says that, as a result of its new definition of capital that introduces the new capital standard of common equity Tier 1 (CET1) and a modified version of what constitutes Tier 1 capital, banks’ gross common equity tier 1 ratio will drop 5.4 percentage points to 5.7% for ‘Group 1’ banks, those with Tier 1 capital of more than $4 billion, while the corresponding decline for ‘Group 2’ banks, with Tier 1 capital lesser than this amount, the drop is set to be 2.9 percentage points. In other words, the capital shortfall for Group1 lenders will fall short of anything between $220 billion at the BCBS’s prescribed lower limit of CET1 of 4.5% and $769 billion for the upper limit of 7%, as per the banks’ balance sheets at the end of 2009.